Information Processing

Recent reports note that Kerviel was up over a billion Euros at the end of 2007. It is impossible for him to have made such a large profit w...

The initial reports are confirmed; Kerviel used hacking to hide his trades: stolen passwords, fake accounts, deep knowledge of the risk man...

I highly recommend this essay in the Financial Times. It notes that current banking and money management compensation schemes create incent...

Societe Generale's L'Affaire Kerviel is unbelievable, and I suspect we'll be learning some interesting details in the coming da...

Note Added  in response to 2020 Twitter mob attack which attempts to misrepresent my views : This is not my research. The lead author aff...

Michael Lewis (Bloomberg) has some interesting comments on Goldman Sachs' vastly superior performance during the subprime meltdown. In a...

I like to remember how you began, not how you ended... NYTimes : There may be only three human activities in which miraculous accomplishment...

I was invited to address a class this morning in the Clark Honors College at U Oregon. The Honors College is like a small, select, liberal ...

We all know who the losers are in the subprime meltdown: shareholders of Citi, Merrill, Countrywide Financial, etc. One of the winners is pr...

Science filmmaker Alom Shaha sent me a link to his site labreporter.com , which features short films about real scientific experiments. Ther...

New paper! You can find some additional discussion on Cosmic Variance . What is the entropy of the universe? Paul Frampton, Stephen D.H. Hsu...

If you have any interest in virtual reality or computer games, I highly recommend this podcast of an interview with Ed Castronova , an econ...

I had to visit this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) for some meetings. What a zoo! 150k attendees descended on Las Vegas for this...

As a consequence of having been a Junior Fellow , I get Harvard Magazine every other month. By comparison, I was a faculty member at Yale, ...

This is apparently the most downloaded economics (SSRN) paper on subprime. Van Hemert is a re-tooled theoretical physicist :-) Understanding...

Bad news for holders of mortgage-backed securities! It looks like an average 15% ( nominal -- larger in real dollars) price decline is req...

Some more reading recommendations, this time on the immediate aftermath of WWII: the Russian occupation of Berlin and the US occupation of T...

Click the image for the original flash graphic, which illustrates quite clearly the re-bundling of securities. The process may sound techni...

I haven't read this yet, but am looking forward to it. (OK, maybe I just like the title and cover :-) Here is the author's web pag...

For years, when asked what I wanted for Christmas, I've been replying peace on earth, good will toward men :-) No one ever seems to ...

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World Clark's book is an ambitious look at world economic history. The first half of...

Via Mark Thoma , this nice summary of how to run a hedge fund, taking advantage of the fee structure and the asymmetry of compensation and r...

I found this tag and notes when I sat down for the afternoon session :-) Miami micro-climate is killing me: outside it's 80 and humid (w...

From the Economist, a nice summary of the Hawks et al. paper on a possible recent speedup in human evolution . Economist : ...Dr Moyzis'...